It's 1938 and fascism is on the march. In Europe, Hitler is poised to take Poland and France, launching the Second World War. In America, a variety of fifth columnist groups think that this is a swell idea, and America should let it happen, and then get rid of their own Jews. The justice system, limited by the First Amendment and widespread antisemitism, isn't going to do much. But one man has an idea. Judge Nathan Perlman makes a call to Meyer Lansky, offering a deal. Lansky and his buddies get to bust heads, Perlman will handle the legal issues as long as no one gets killed.

Welcome to Anti-Fascist Action, gangland style.


Always Be Punching Nazis.
The only linkable gif I can find has the Nazi exploding sonic style

Gangsters vs Nazis is a pulpy as hell take on true events. Meyer Lansky, one of the key figures in American organized crime, gathered up his favorite enforcers from Murder Inc and started hitting meetings of the German-American Bund. Lesser Jewish gangsters did much the same in Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark, and Los Angeles. Though the Nazis often had the numbers, their cadres of weekend warriors were no match for the hardened thugs, goons, and boxers that the gangsters could call upon. In a few years, it became clear that being an American Nazi was a painful business, and the dreaded fifth column came to nothing after Pearl Harbor.

The history is fascinating enough, and this book shines in cameo portraits of its various figures. But Benson badly over-eggs his story, inventing camera movements and treating this like a screenplay rather than a book. And while Nazis badly need a fist to the face, the gangsters are portrayed uncritically as heroes, when they were also murderers and thugs.

If I were to read one book on the subject, it'd be Hitler in Los Angeles, which is a more interesting take, though one with less punching.

When I googled RAND a minute ago to get an image for this article, one of the automatic suggests was "Does the RAND corporation still exist?" And to a paraphrase a certain Dark Lord of the Sith, this think tank is still fully operational. Abella traces the history of the RAND corporation from the years immediately after WW2 through the contemporary Bush administration War on Terror. It's a fascinating story about people, ideas, and empire, which unfortunately does not quite come together.


Chain Reaction, a sculpture by political cartoonist Paul Conrad which the city of Santa Monica put up across the street from RAND headquarters

RAND was born out of operational research in the Second World War, and the general melding of scientific expertise and air power. Every bomber wing had an attached operations research team, helping to find efficient solutions to logistical problems, and more broadly science had culminated in victory and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the post-war drawdown, the Army Air Corps, soon to be elevated as the separate United States Air Force, looked for an institutional scientific advising agency to preserve some of the talent that had helped it win the war. Douglas Aircraft executive Franklin R. Collbohm spun off RAND as that advisory body, and served as president for the next 20 years.

So first, the people. RAND was envisioned as a 'college without students', and snatched up a diverse collection of quantitative scholars. People associated with RAND have gone on to be awarded 32 individual Nobel prizes, mostly in physics and economics. Flush with government contracts, RANDites were cultured avante-garde gourmands, enjoying the best of midcentury modernism while fighting arcane intellectual battles with outsiders and each other. Albert Wohlstetter gets most of the attention, like due to the accessibility of his family, but Daniel Ellsberg, the once-golden child turned turned traitor, also gets plenty of space. While there is a lot on the stereotype of RAND's numerical expertise, as well as colorful portraits of people like Herman Kahn and Bernard Brodie, these sketches lack the rich detail of Lepore's If/Then.

Second were the ideas. RAND introduced major advances in systems analysis, a comprehensive extension of operations research statistical methods to map out the total cost of programs and their ability to meet policy objectives. Systems analysis has become the one way the complex programs are managed, with RAND's Air Force procurement and basing studies the origins of a approach to project management that is both data-driven, and embeds assumptions around the world. RAND also served as the genesis of the nuclear strategy that drove the Cold War, clarifying the options around mutually assured destruction, counter-force targeting, and second strike capabilities. and finally, RAND analyst Kenneth Arrow developed rational choice theory, the theory that everybody is a rational utility maximizing entity with no emotional or ideological commitments, and that government is best served by providing options to let individuals maximize their choices. Abella argues that rational choice theory is the capitalist antithesis to Marxist dialectical materialism, an idea which conquered the world because it works well-enough, but which fails because we know that we ourselves are not rational.

And finally, there's the moral dimension, the way that RAND has been intimately involved in American Empire. RAND is an ardently Cold War organization, and many of it leading lights not only thought that a nuclear war could be won, but that it should be fought as soon as possible, before the Soviets got more bombs. RAND analyst Herman Kahn (Thinking the Unthinkable) served as the inspiration for many of the characters in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. On balance, even if the RAND analysts weighing of global thermonuclear war was horrific, as guardians of the ultimate weapon they prevented that final war. RAND's forays into limited war were far less successful. RAND research proved Vietnam would be far more difficult than the administration wanted, and was ignored by the White House. Ellsberg's leak of the The Pentagon Papers is a wound which has not yet healed. Neoconservatives incubated at RAND lead the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. RAND's domestic policy research is a mixed bag (they invented the health insurance copay), though austerity neoliberalism is positively fuzzy compared to resurgent neofascism. Abella concludes by noting that while RAND has often proposed horrific things, they do so in "our" name, giving the rest of us license to live in the thinkable, knowing that hard truths are stored in an anodyne office in Santa Monica for when they're needed.

Soldier's of Reason is fast and readable, but it needs MORE, to go deeper into the intellectual history, or at least into the weirder personal proclivities of these mid-century mandarins.

"The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote."
--Ambassador Kosh, Babylon 5

Devices and Desires is about the unfolding of a reasonable man pushed to unreasonable ends. Ziani Vaatzes is an engineer for the Mezentine Republic, which rules its hinterlands through economic and technological domination. Vaatzes starts the book sentenced to die for the crime of exceeding the Republic's holy Specifications in building a clockwork toy for his daughter. But rather than die, he breaks free and makes his way to a mountainous duchy that has just lost a war to Republic. He'll build weapons for them, teach them the secrets of precision engineering, and let them get revenge. Of course, it's all a part of Vaatzes' real plan for a private revenge, and the engineer doesn't care how many lives he has to ruin to get home.

The theme to this book, hammered again and again, is the inescapabilty of causality. Vaatzes has no choice but to design his revenge. The Mezentine Republic has no choice but to launch a genocidal war to prevent Vaatzes' knowledge from escaping. Various nobles have no choice but to be dutiful or or disciplined or indecisive, as their upbringing shaped them. It's not a very satisfying theme, if we want to believe that characters have agency.

Devices and Desires is fine, if a little long, and I'll probably read the rest of the series. But honestly, it feels like a first draft of ideas Parker handled with much more verve in the incredible 16 Ways to Defend a Walled City

Lynesse is an adventuring princess, come to claim the aid of a legendary sorcerer against a foul demon which threatens her world.

Nyr is an anthropologist, last remaining member of a planetary observation team, drifting through the centuries in suspended animation and waiting for world from Earth. And he's also Lynesse's sorcerer, a man who's knowledge of science, defensive implants, and ability to communicate with legacy technology from the colonization effort gives him uncanny powers.

The story is told in alternating chapters. Lynesse trying to live up to the demands of royal statecraft which have never suited her and ancient legends which are impossible to live up to. Nyr is torn between his ethical mission not to interfere, the role the locals have placed in him, and his own depression, barely kept at bay by a Disassociative Cognition System, which blanks out all those pesky emotions and enables him to make logical decisions.

This story is at its best in the dual uses of language, how when Nyr says "scientist" Lynesse hears "wizard", and how a matter of fact account of a generation ship becomes a mythic voyage across the stars. The plot isn't that original, and I think falls apart in never adequately explaining the nature of the demon, but huge points for picking a story and writing only the necessary parts when the genre tends towards long and overwritten epics.

This is my first Tchaikovsky, and if the rest are anywhere comparable, I've got a lot of popcorn to enjoy.

Guys will literally watch Heat instead of going to therapy. Trust me on this, I'm guys. Heat is a fantastic movie, Mann an incredible director of crime and action, and the movie is gorgeously shot and full of top-tier performances, from Pacino's deranged detective Vincent Hanna, to De Niro's professional and tactical criminal mastermind Neil McCauley, and Val Kilmer's icy gunman Chris Shiherlis. The movie is perfect and self contained, and doesn't really need a sequel.

But we have one anyone, because Mann is not done with these characters. And you know, this story is parasitic, but perfectly fine, advancing on three parallel timelines. In 1988, we meet McCauley and Hanna much as they are, with Hanna chasing a psychopathic home invader in Chicago, and McCauley planning a heist against a Mexican cartel. Immediately after the events of the movie in 1996, Shiherlis is recovering from his wounds and working as a security contractor for a Taiwanese-Paraguayian crime family. And in 2000, lose ends are being tied up, with Hanna, the psychopathic home invader, and Shiherlis helping the daughter of the crime family move to the next level.

If you like Heat, you're going to enjoy this book, which is much like the movie, but more. But I think without the movie, and without Pacino and Kilmer in my head, this wouldn't have been nearly as good. The writing is a lot like a screenplay, terse and telegraphic, stating images and moods rather than making them. The novel is not Mann's form, and while co-author Gardiner does her best to flesh it out, you can see where the dialog crackles, and when this book needs light, sound, and actors to make it live.

But hey, you're not going to go to therapy are you?

Kim Philby ranks as one of the greatest spies in history, and one of the greatest traitors. Outwardly a charming member of the British establishment and MI-6, privately Philby was a committed Communist and passed every secret he could garner on to Moscow. One of the brightest of the Young Turks, Philby was being groomed for the top slot at MI-6.

Macintyre's book is a story of the friendship between Philby and his greatest defender, Nicholas Elliott, and of a whole British ruling class of the right sort of people: good families, public schools, Oxbridge, government service, and so on. Macintyre quotes C.S. Lewis on the role of the toxic idea of the Inner Circle on British society, that there are ever more exclusive clubs where real power is held, and this inner circleness drove and destroyed Philby, as much as any ideological commitment. After all, spycraft is more exclusive than ordinary government service, and being a double agent is more exclusive than being a spy.

Philby worked as a journalist through the 30s, concealing his true politics and getting close to Franco and prominent Nazis. He was a war correspondent during the Battle of France, and after the fall of France was posted into British intelligence as an expert in propaganda. He befriended Elliott, a true member of the elite (Elliot's father was headmaster at Eton), and began a meteoric rise through the ranks, turning over what he uncovered to his Soviet masters. Philby likely blew the defections of the Volkovs in Istanbul, turned over the names of hundreds of Catholic anti-Nazi and anti-Communist activists in Soviet occupied Germany, and doomed Albanian sabotage missions after the war. He has a lot of blood on his hands.

Philby was posted to America, where he befriended the anglophile James Angleton, the CIA counter-intelligence chief. Well-lubricated parties served him well, until his involvement with Guy Burgess, a more flamboyant and self-destructive Soviet spy in the British foreign office, derailed his career. Burgess was drunk, homosexual, loud, possibly brain damaged, and Philby's close friend and house-guest. When another of the Cambridge Five, Donald Maclean, was under immanent threat of being blown, Burgess was used to organize the escape. Philby fell under an immediate cloud, and while there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that he was also a spy, the Establishment protected its own, and while his career was iced, he remained free.

By 1955, a destitute Philby was back in good enough graces to be offered another intelligence job as an agent in Beirut. His marriage to Aileen Philby had by that point more or less disintegrated under the weight of deception, alcohol, and her mental illness. Philby spent another 8 years in Beirut, drinking heavily and a lackluster reporter (his cover) and agent. According to Macintyre, it was Philby's journalism that did him in. His pro-Arab slant annoyed an old acquaintance, the British Zionist activist Flora Solomon. Solomon had introduced Kim and Ailene, and remembered in the 30s that Kim had made a clumsy effort to recruit her as a Soviet spy. She had the credibility which MI-5 investigators lacked, and Elliott confronted Philby in Beirut, where Philby confessed. But then, incredibly, Philby managed to defect to Moscow, where he lived until dying in 1988. Macintyre convincingly argues this was deliberate, that the public spectacle of another spy trial in London would have so thoroughly discredited MI-6 that defection was a better option, and that a lack of surveillance was deliberately arranged.

This is a thrilling true story of a vanished age, when government was run by "gentlemen", and when being the right sort of person could forgive almost any transgression. The incestuous world of British intelligence is perhaps best revealed by a security briefing between Elliot and another officer.

[paraphrased]
OFFICER: Does your wife know what you do?
ELLIOT: I should think so. She was my secretary for two years first.
OFFICER: How about your mother?
ELLIOT: She does, a member of the War Cabinet told her I was a spy at a party.
OFFICER: And your father, does he know?
ELLIOT: Yes. The Chief told his at White's Club.

With the right accent, the right clothes, the right attitude, it was so impossible that Philby was a double agent that everyone ignored the evidence until it was far too late.

Escape from Yokai Land is an ordinary day in the life of Bob Howard, aka The Eater of Souls. Japan has requested assistance with a rising tide of extraplanar entities, and whatever happened last time with Angleton in Japan pissed a whole bunch of people off.

A very jetlagged Bob has to meet with his Japanese counterpart, deal with diplomacy and minor monsters, and then face an entity which is pink and cute and has grown fat on the worship of millions of children, and if it gets just a little stronger will turn into a kaiju that'll stomp Tokyo.


And you shall have a Dread Queen

So hey, it's The Laundry, it not a top rank story, but it's better than some of the middle ones. Decent novella for completionists.

I extended a bridge of trust to the previous books in this series, which had good qualities and bad ones. The Last Hero repaid my trust in spades, as Lewis brings it all home in an explosive conclusion. The forces of war and evil have never been stronger, as the worst elements among the Icarii, the Gaen theocracy, and the Aster underclass strive to land a final killing blow in their multisided war. Meanwhile, our heroes have to navigate their weaknesses, their separation, and their love for each and for peace to find a solution before the whole blows up.

This is a confident, assured finale that has grown into its own thing and understands how to use multiple points of view with aplomb. Bravo!

The Spear Cuts Through Water knocked my socks off, so I figured I'd try Jimenez's other book. The Vanished Birds is a odd, digressive space opera focusing on longing, love, and loss. We begin with a boy on an agricultural world defined by the every 15 year cycle of the interstellar trade fleet. Kaeda grows up and falls in love with a space captain, who's lives intersect for one night every 15 years.

On the last round, when he's an old man, he hands off to the space captain a strange mute boy, who arrived naked in a fireball from the night sky. We follow Nia and the boy on their ramshackle little freighter, and take another lengthy digression 1000 years in the past, to a dying Earth where advanced technology can not keep ahead of ecological disaster, where a ugly little girl, Fumiko, falls in love, and abandons her lover to pursue a job for a powerful and possessive conglomerate. Fumuko designs massive space stations which will save the lives of one billion people.

Shame about everyone else.

And then back to the present, with Nia and the boy. They run into Fumiko, still alive via cold sleep and interstellar travel, which is FTL but due to time currents, a journey of subjective weeks means a gap of years at the destination. Fumiko is still a brilliant scientist, and she thinks that the boy is a jaunter, a rumored miracle who can teleport between planets, ending slow and messy space travel. Nia gets a new mission and a new crew to shepherd the boy around the frontier, outside of Alliance space, until his powers manifest or 15 years arrive.

And his powers do manifest, but what should be a moment of unified triumph and wonder for mankind instead turns into a horror of betrayals and monstrous exploitation, and a thrilling conclusion of revenge.

So what worked? As expected, the absolute mood of this book, the stylishness of the sentence to sentence writing, the adventures of the creaking ship, the very obvious losses and damages of the characters. The evil of the Alliance as an imperial power was revealed in layers of glorious villainy, the veins of fire inside the iron fist inside the velvet glove. The characters, their need for each other, and the distance between them, also came through. Plot, pacing, and internal coherency were tertiary concerns. The Vanished Birds is imaginative and well-crafted, but Spear is fucking perfect.

The Future of War is a magisterial synthesis of conflict studies by one of the field's leading practitioners. I'll admit I was half hoping for a review of weird military futurism, but this is a serious study of how people have thought about war, from Victorian invasion literature such as The Battle of Dorking through the 2017 US Department of Defense Quadrennial Review.


It's a good question. Why don't we have baby assault tanks?

Freedman identifies three major periods in conflict studies. The first is that of traditional industrial warfare. German victories against Austria and France in the 19th century demonstrated the potential of the strategic surprise offensive to rapidly achieve political ends. A county that was unprepared or slow to mobilize could find its army destroyed as it gathered and its capitol occupied. The cult of the offensive lead to the slaughter of the First World War, and the fearful reaction that future wars would be slow, bloody, and exhausting. Airpower, fortification lines, and blitzkrieg were reactions to the First World War, which proved in the Second World War that in total war there were no limits, that the entire population was a valid military objective. Nuclear weapons provided the ultimate example of the cult of the offensive by finally offering the ability to completely annihilate an enemy in a matter of minutes, at the expense of poisoning the planet and potentially inviting an omnicidal retaliation.

Mutually assured destruction was one keystone of the lack of superpower conflict after World War 2. The other, in Freedman's estimation, was a strong respect for the norm of national sovereignty. With some significant asterisks, like countries that had been partitioned in the wake of the Second World War, or minor countries without allies who found themselves on the wrong side of a superpower like Afghanistan or Panama, war was not seen as a practical matter of achieving political ends.

This international consensus shifted in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and bloody civil wars in Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps national sovereignty had to be balanced against human rights, and the international community had a duty to prevent civil wars from escalating. Freedman is skeptical of humanitarian interventions. While they may save lives, there is a little clarity about why civil wars start or end, and these conflicts can become frozen without any chance of political resolution.

9/11 and the War on Terror provided a third shift, as the United States embarked on a globe spanning war not against nations, but against shifting groups of terrorists. As an aside, I enjoyed the back to back chapters "From Counter-Insurgency to Counter-Terrorism" and "From Counter-Terrorism to Counter-Insurgency" describing the failures of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent surge. It seems that war will continue to be a feature of the human experience, even as the frequency and intensity of conflicts on many measures has declined.

Since this book came out in 2017, it can't cover the lurching uncertainty of Trump's Actual Madman Presidency, China's increased naval aggressiveness, or the major conflicts such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the drone heavy Second Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Overall, this is a masterful synthesis of a complex topic, and well worth the read.